Music-Sharing Service LimeWire Shuts Down

After ten years of existence, peer-to-peer music sharing service LimeWire is joining Napster, Kazaa, and all the rest.

LimeWire will abide by a court-ordered injunction today and begin to disable the file-sharing and music-searching features of its P2P software. Years of legal battles and the prospects of paying astronomical fines finally did the service in.

“This is an official notice that LimeWire is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software. Downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal.”

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TechCrunch reports that the company, LimeCompany, will soldier on. Transitioning to a music store or legal streaming music service, however, will be tough. It fought a good fight, and lasted longer than most other P2P services. Partly that was because there was usually a bigger P2P sharing service freaking out the music industry. Once the lawyers got rid of those, they finally got around to LimeWire. Still, it took them the better part of a decade to get LimeWire to comply with an injunction.

I always thought those file sharing sites were only good at passing viruses — I never stopped buying CD’s.